IS THERE a rift between the Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Beatrice?

According to gossip doing the rounds, Beatrice, who is sixth in line of succession to the throne, feels “overshadowed” by Kate and has become “resentful” of the worldwide interest in her.

This febrile chatter has now been amplifi ed by an Australian magazine, Woman’s Day, which has reported that “while Kate has been winning hearts around the world, Beatrice and her sister Eugenie have been relegated to attending garden parties and cutting ribbons”.

The magazine claims that Beatrice, 26, “complains to friends that Kate – the ‘Chosen One’ – ‘gets the glamour jobs, the clothing allowance, the limos and the bodyguards, while I have to travel economy’”.

It says that Beatrice makes openly snide remarks about Kate and her sister Pippa, whom she describes as “vacuous” and “pushy”.

Beatrice, the elder daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, is alleged to have called Kate “a commoner” and to have made withering comments about Kate’s determination to maintain a slim frame.

The report adds that Beatrice, whose most recent job has been as an intern at Sony Pictures in London, was scheduled to announce her engagement to her boyfriend of seven years Dave Clark but before she could go public Kate “hogged the limelight again” with the announcement of her second pregnancy.

For some time there has been talk, not reported by the magazine, that William and Harry do not get on with Dave, who works for Sir Richard Branson. It has been said that they view him as “too fl ash”.

When I raised the subject of a rift with a friend who is close to William and Kate, it was quickly dismissed as mischievous tittle-tattle.

He added: “It’s not true; Beatrice is too good-natured to say those sort of things. She admires Kate.”

That old toughie Ray Winstone has mixed memories of being a junior actor at a theatre in East London.

He recalls: “As if getting paid £30 a week wasn’t bad enough, you had to put up with Vanessa Redgrave coming down to tell you how you should give half your wages to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party.

I respect anybody else’s opinion, but I’ve never been into all that ‘commie’ lark. My thing was always ‘you’ve got to look after your own’. “Either way, I ain’t giving you £15 a week of my money. ‘Sell your house, darling’. That was how I looked at it.”

The Queen is said to be concerned that the lovely theatre that is virtually on her doorstep at Windsor is in danger of closing its doors after 114 years.

And so is Basil Brush. “It is one of the friendliest theatres you can work in, and I have worked in a lot in my time. It is opposite the castle and it just looks fantastic,” barks Basil, who is due to star in the pantomime Beauty And The Beast this Christmas.

The foxy figure has joined a local campaign to save the theatre, after its owners said that all shows need to hit 70 per cent attendance to break even, but that often performances are only 20 per cent full.

But Basil proclaims: “When children come into the theatre, they put down their electronic games and they become kids again.

They shout and scream, and that is what we want them to do. It’s magical.”

Lily Rose will star in new Pride and Prejudice film [REX]

The alluring actress LILY JAMES, who plays Lord Grantham’s naughty cousin Lady Rose in Downton Abbey, has been doing an awful lot of exercising for her new role as Elizabeth Bennet in a wacky fi lm adaptation of Pride And Prejudice.

Bizarrely, the characters of Jane Austen’s novel are all pitted against bands of marauding zombies. “Elizabeth is a really bad-ass kicker – a dedicated zombie slayer,” giggles 25-year-old Lily when we met last week.

“I’ve done an awful lot of training for the role, boxing, gym work, but I couldn’t really get going on all of that until we’d fi nished filming Downton, because the producers told me that they didn’t want to see muscly arms when Lady Rose was sitting at the dinner table.”

Her next fi lm will be a “downstairs” role in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s interpretation of Cinderella.

Says Lily, who is stepping out with former Dr Who star Matt Smith: “I prefer being in Cinderella’s rags than in her ballgown.

Lady Rose would have been far more content as a maid, I think. She’s bored witless with all that upstairs etiquette, and I’m with her on that one.”

The tiresome twitcher Bill Oddie is facing a backlash over his comments that British families should be “contained” to stop them having too many children.

He claimed the answer to over-population was not curbing immigration, but restricting the size of families.

Hmm... “containing” bumptious Bill was something I had to do some years ago when I called in at the Somerset home of my girlfriend of the time to find Oddie attempting to corner her as if she were some breed of wayward wildlife (which she was actually; lovely plumage but prone to wandering from the roost).

I had to tell him to put away his minuscule binoculars and to desist his mating ritual. The Great Bearded Tit.

Kathy Lette claims the greatest aphrodisiac is a man who can cook [REX]

That sharp-tongued novelist Kathy Lette is not a fan of Domestic Goddesses.

“I’d like to see them roasted slowly on a spit with an apple, because I just think all that time Emmeline Pankhurst spent getting us out of the kitchen, and now they’re getting us back in,” she hisses.

“I think the greatest aphrodisiac is a man in the kitchen. I’d like to have Jamie Oliver served naked on a bed of meringue. Any man in an apron would be great, women love that. To have a man cook for you is foreplay for females.”

And why, pray, is Kathy so spiky on the subject of Domestic Goddesses? Could it be because her hubby, the QC Geoffrey Robertson, used to date Nigella Lawson?

As Kathy recalls: “When he dropped her for me, everyone went: “How could he leave that lovely woman for this loudmouthed nympho?” My response was, ‘How dare they call me a loudmouth?’”

It would be fair to say that Anthony, the patrician star of Brideshead Revisited, is a little piqued that his long-standing chum Julian Fellowes has not offered him a role in Downton.

“You’ll have to ask Julian why he hasn’t; I’d love to be offered a role,” he told me after a talk he gave with Derek Granger, the producer of Brideshead, at Eastbourne College, where Granger was a pupil.

“Julian and I go back a long way,” added Anthony, 66, who played Sebastian Flyte opposite Jeremy Irons in the Brideshead mini-series 33 years ago.

“I used to own a house in Hollywood, long before Julian was famous, and he would borrow it when I wasn’t there and throw the most outlandish parties. “I know this because the guests would tell me later and wondered why I hadn’t been invited.”

Even though she wears a ring on her wedding finger, Kirstie Allsopp has no intention of marrying her partner of 10 years, property developer Ben Andersen, with whom she has two sons.

Kirsty, 42, declares: “I’ve got to the point where I take a perverse delight in not being married. I have no bridal fantasies. I did when I was little but I spend my life being the centre of attention and I’m not always happy with that.”

Appropriately for the presenter of property programmes, Kirsty considers housing to be more a priority in people’s lives than getting hitched.

She says: “I’ve seen people on the show who say, ‘If we find the right house, I’ll get pregnant, I’ll have a baby, if we just find the right house’! No. Just buy any old house, get in and get knocked up.